Education Or Jobs?

     The never-ending contentions over American education have several parts. One of them, “higher education,” is particularly significant for this reason:

Conservatives often criticize universities for failing to prepare students for jobs.

But that's like criticizing a library for failing to function as a gym.

The purpose of a university was never vocational training. It was always the pursuit and transmission of knowledge.

— Liza Libes (@pensandpoison) June 13, 2026

     That dichotomy is the secret shame of the American educational system. But it’s also a consequence, rather than a primary that can be addressed in isolation.

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     The history of compulsory education in America is worthy of more attention than it gets from the typical adult. Time was – and I’m not talking about the Pleistocene Era here, but the mid-19th Century – a “grammar school” education was all that was required by law. Moreover, a student didn’t need to traverse eight grades to escape the school’s clutches. What he needed was his teacher’s endorsement of his ability to function as an adult. As the greater part of the population was engaged in agriculture or other manual labor, that didn’t demand much.

     But as John Gall told us in his classic Systemantics, every system embeds a growth dynamic. Grow or stagnate and die is the rule. “Education” proved to be no exception. Once teaching became a recognized occupation, schools ceased to be regarded as a local convenience for imparting literacy and numeracy. They fell into the hands of careerists eager to see their domain enlarge.

     That process was contemporaneous with the rise of industrial America: the transformation of our previous, family-centered agriculture-heavy economy into an urban one heavy with employers and employees. Over time, parents surrendered their part in the education of their children to the schools, while the schools came ever more completely under political authority. “High schools” were born, as were teachers’ colleges. Teaching specialties took a bit longer to emerge, but shortly after the turn of the 20th Century we no longer spoke of “teachers” as an undifferentiated mass.

     But as the system expanded, it also moved away from its previous mandate: i.e., to teach the basic skills required of an adult citizen and leave all else to the home environment. Systems do that sort of thing. Among other diversions of educational effort, we began to see “practical” courses and the “vocational” school: things previously neither required nor requested by the parents of minor children. Prior to the Civil War, the idea of classes in “Home Economics” or “Shop” never occurred to an American parent. That was what Mom and Dad were for.

     With the rise of large enterprises and the need for management came a need for “white collar” employees: persons removed from manual labor who commanded informational skills. (The occupational designation “white collar” apparently originated with writer Upton Sinclair in 1911.) By then, the fundamental skills taught by the “grammar school” had been expanded by the “high school” to include more extensive education in literature, mathematics beyond arithmetic, history and geography, and rudimentary knowledge of the sciences.

     For a while, those two segments of schooling maintained themselves and their putative duties stably and successfully. But change was coming. World wars, conscription, industrialism, unionism, state encroachments on previously local prerogatives and, eventually, federal encroachments on state prerogatives were soon to come upon the United States. All of those trends promoted giantism, the disease that anonymizes decision makers and insulates them against the choices and opinions of the common man. In unionism, teachers found a route toward increased respect and prosperity. State governments were slowly compelled to mandate union membership for teachers employed in government-run schools.

     The “educational system” expanded enormously. Property taxes intended to pay for the government-run schools swelled to such an extent that only a small minority of families could afford a private or religious school for their children. Alternatives to the government-run school system dwindled. With the dwindling of competition and the overweening authority of “departments of education” came the consequence one must always expect from a government monopoly: sharp declines in educational quality and in responsiveness to the parents of school-age children.

     There was one path left to follow.

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     For parents and children who wanted a better and fuller education than was available from the government-run schools, the sole recourse was to “higher education.” That, until relatively recently, remained outside government control. And indeed, a student admitted to a college or university did still have opportunities to learn much to which he hadn’t yet been exposed. But after World War II, the returning GIs were mainly concerned with making a living. Most had had their twelve years of government schooling. They looked upon the American economy, now dominated by corporations, and sought the kind of education that would ready them for corporate employment.

     Government loan and grant programs offered the GI the possibility of free college education. They took it in large numbers. Colleges and universities sprang up like toadstools in response. And to an increasing degree, the education they provided leaned toward readiness for employment. The older goal of a college education, acquainting the student with “the best that has been thought and said,” slowly receded from the priorities of everyone involved.

     Now that governments provide by far the greater portion of funding for “higher education,” those institutions prioritize what governments want. There are still “liberal and humane arts” colleges, but in comparison to the larger number, they’re fewer than ever before. Above all, governments want money. Therefore, they want the “educational system” to produce workers, ready to earn taxable incomes. With the quality of “primary” and “secondary” education having fallen so far that even Ivy League colleges offer remedial reading and high-school mathematics courses, preparation for employment, especially in “white collar” positions, has become the province of “higher education.”

     Most of the above has come upon us so gradually as to be invisible. That’s how social and institutional transformations occur. And this one has conquered education in the United States so completely that any possibility of undoing it – returning early schooling to its original mission and “higher education” to the mission of enrichment it once pursued – is beyond my power of imagination.